I’m not sure which is right because the physicists do not seem to agree.
For the student on the academic calendar, time is cyclical. A slow upward spiral. The year is broken into a predictable pattern of semesters and breaks, distinct from the past and yet entirely recognizable. For some, this repetition can feel like a endless death march, a treadmill leading nowhere, ever circling: class after class broken only by the brief sunshine of a summer break. I suppose for those who dislike the formal setting of school, such a calendar might be suffocating. But now that I have been done with college for a year and off that routine for the first time since I was making finger paintings in preschool, I find myself missing the old familiar rhythms of academia. Patterns are comforting, I’ve discovered, and everything is easier to endure when you have an idea of what comes next. Isn’t this how the world survives winter?
In any case, while the academic calendar has built-in predictability, it also has built-in variety, and this is really what I miss. Each semester promises something new: a new class schedule and pattern of life, new people with whom to cross paths. For me, a new sports season. If there is a class you really can’t stand, well, you only have to gut it out for a few months. If you have a living situation that’s terrible, you can always sign up for a different one next year. Each January and especially each August offer possibilities of new adventures, experiences, knowledge, and friends. A school setting, particularly college, is one of the few places that can provide such regular novelty free from many of the stresses and fears that often accompany change.
During one of my lower moments this winter, when I was feeling particularly dramatic and pitiful, I wrote in my journal how difficult it was to look into a future that has no foreseeable marking points. No spring break. No fresh start of the school year in August. Not even a new summer job to break up the monotony. Just the same life stretching endless forward, an unbending line disappearing into the fog. Work. Bills. Sleep. To think about life this way was (and is) very depressing; I don’t recommend it. Out of my inner chaos, I began brainstorming ways to escape my life in Grand Rapids, to run away---quite literally. I saw this as the only way to rediscover the variety I missed from college life and, more to the point, to push the restart button on what I felt were the millions of mistakes I’d made since graduation.
What I didn’t see then was the way that life has of creating its own novelty, even without, yes, a new class calendar. I wanted a do-over, like the do-overs I got at the start of each school year.
A few nights ago I watched a documentary on my laptop on happiness, clicking on it impulsively after scrolling through my brother’s Netflix account. One thing that happiness researchers have found is that novelty, even in very minor things, has a big impact on emotional well-being.
Something as simple as changing up your running route or cooking a new dish for dinner can trigger releases of dopamine in the brain and boost your outlook on life. So perhaps I can’t entirely be blamed for desiring a change in my routine, wanting a bend in that straight line of time, or at least a bend that I could see. When you aren’t enjoying life and out of necessity that life doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon, of course you’re going to feel depressed.
But the solution to this, I realize now, is not scrapping the whole thing, biking alone across the country, and starting over from zero. That was my original self-rescue plan. Adventures like that can be good, but not when their primary purpose is to serve as an escape from a life that I half-heartedly tried to build in reluctant fits and starts. I shouldn’t have been surprised when it wasn’t really working for me.
Academic calendars have made me used to do-overs. I’m used to having the opportunity to start fresh each year, erase my mistakes (to a certain extent), and try again with a new class, professor, job, or sports season. But sometimes you have to gut through a job you don’t like for (gasp!) longer than 4 or 8 months. Sometimes, probably most of the time, when you screw up, you don’t have the luxury of starting over. You have to piece together what is left and move forward with the glue still drying.
As a perfectionist, this reality is particularly difficult for me to accept. When I mess up, in anything---a round of mini-golf, my writing, a relationship, an art project, a job---I like to be able to start over completely and forget the whole thing ever happened. Square one. A blank slate. That way I don’t have to deal with the awkwardness of living with something that is askew. It’s like when you have a crush on someone and they clearly reject you---you’d really just prefer to never see that person again.
But in this documentary that I watched, the researchers also stressed that happiness comes from challenges and difficulties, and people who struggle often become more joyful in the end. It’s a counter-intuitive reality, and one that isn’t exactly comforting in the midst of trial. Even knowing this, I’d still probably use the do-over button an awful lot if life offered one. So I guess it’s good that it doesn’t.
I’ve found that sometimes the hardest challenge of all is staring down that unbending line of life, the one that seems to promise no change worth celebrating, and reminding yourself that its straightness is an illusion. That life comes with seasons, some of which may be longer and less regular than those promised by a school schedule, but seasons nonetheless. Variety and change and unpredictable adventures. And in any case, I guess it’s ok to do the same thing for more than 8 consecutive months. It won’t kill me.
